Heads In Beds Show - Building Ad Targeting Audiences On Google, Facebook & Instagram That Deliver The Right Results

Episode Date: December 20, 2023

In this episode Conrad and Paul dive into how to build the right audiences and target ads across Google Search, Facebook, Instagram and Google Display.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Beds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. Mr. Manzi, how's it going? You know, it feels like we're in the holiday season, even though we're in Minnesota, and I'm thinking it's going to be a green Christmas here. So I have mixed emotions right now is the easiest way to put it.

But yeah, at least I didn't have to worry about, I happened to catch a little college football scoreboard watching. And you guys had a bowl game down in Myrtle Beach this past weekend, and it did look like something i didn't have to watch that so there was that how are you doing sir two teams played football on the teal field i will also admit that i did not watch it although it was really weird i follow this host for vison her name is stormy bonatoni and she was the side by side play by play or sorry side by side on the sideline and i was like i saw her post a picture the picture

at the sky wheel because i follow her on twitter or x now and that was a weird moment where i'm like clearly i've been paying attention like why is she here and she was doing the sideline for the myrtle beach bowl so there you go yeah we did have some college football down here i did not attend it's funny i think the coastal carolina where they actually that's their home stadium you have to go play in hawaii if memory serves correctly so someone flew down to myrtle beach to play in the myrtle beach bowl it's actually in Conway is where the actual stadium is. But I digress. And then the team that actually is based in Myrtle Beach has to fly to Hawaii, a much

nicer beach to actually play their bowl game. So it should be fun and exciting. But yeah, we missed last week, unfortunately. So for those eagle eyed listeners who may not have seen an episode last week, some illness running through Paul's house, some illness running through my house. This will be our I think this is my first COVID episode. So I'm recovering, I feel. But yeah, last week, recovering from the COVID illness,

not particularly recommended or encouraged. So we'll try to button, put our shoelaces on, tighten things up and get out here on ad targeting. So I don't have a good transition. I think COVID takes your brain processing power down a little bit. So I'm not even going to try. What is your, what's your thought process here, Paul? So we're going to talk today about ad targeting. We can start maybe on the Google side and we'll layer in Facebook as well. Yeah. My frame on this, clients ask us all the time. It's so funny because every, a lot of like new clients or people that haven't done much

digital advertising come to me and they immediately want to run Facebook ads. And I sometimes have to remind them like, maybe I'm not saying that we can't do Facebook ads or that they can't be a successful part of our ad strategy, but it may make a lot more sense for us to do Google ads at first. And then they always say this, and this is one of those things, I was saying this when I was at Darm too a few weeks back,

and it just gets repeated and then people nod their head, even though it's not true. They go, oh, Google ads are really expensive or Google ads have a lot of competition. And in my head, I'm thinking, what's the wrong way to think about it? It's not that there is or isn't competition

or that it is or isn't expensive. That's such a relative term anyways. The question is, when I pay money to Google, what sort of traffic do I get back? And how does that traffic behave on my website? Does it lead to bookings? Does it lead to conversions? And so on.

And when I pay for traffic from other sources, whether it be Facebook or Instagram or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we can go down a long list if we want to. How does that traffic perform? And what's the business impact from that? So maybe I could start by leading off with this thesis that I have. And maybe you agree with that. Maybe you don't. Which is that maybe Google traffic costs you more per click, but I

don't care because it converts so much better. So what's your thought process when it comes to working with someone new when you were on the guest side, or even on the owner side of where traffic comes from, and then most importantly, how it performs and how much it costs to get that traffic? I think I agree with you. But I think there's even a caveat as to how we think of Google versus Facebook, because predominantly we use Google as a search engine, the search side, the Google search ads. Now, if you're using Google display ads and doing something like that, I still don't know that's that much better.

And I think it does get into what we're going to discuss here with some of the audience that you can use and what you can't do. Generally, yeah, when it comes right down to it, any Google traffic that has hit your site on from a search ad or from a search ad campaign, there's some type of intent. They have demonstrated, they have actively gone out and searched something out,

whether that's vacation rentals, whether that's management, whether that's lodging accommodations, could be very explicit, could be long tail, could be anything like that. But there's some type of intent there. The only thing someone's done when they've gotten onto Facebook is they've logged into Facebook.

They've logged into a social media platform. So the intent of that audience is just not, it is, they're looking to see what's in their feed, what's in their reels, what's in their something. They want to know more about what's happening to them personally. Now, thanks to cookies, thanks to the pixel, thanks to everything that we can do behind the scenes. We can serve up ads to those targeted audiences. However, we decide to bucket those people, cohort those people, do anything like that. But ultimately, that intent isn't there. And I think that's the biggest difference between when we look at search intent traffic versus any display, any video, anything like that, is somehow you're trying to

aggregate an audience, whether you're using third party sources, whether you're using a pixel, whether you're using a custom audience list, whether you're uploading a list into something like that. Yeah, but there may be some intent if you're uploading a list into something like that. Yeah, but there may be some intent if you're doing like a booking, retargeting or something like that. They had booked with you at some point. But for the most part, that's the big distinguishing factor is that they're not demonstrating really any intent in wanting to see that. So I think naturally it is going to be.

It's the interruption marketing that we've talked about so often. You are trying to interrupt the flow of someone's feed or someone's, again, experience on social media, whereas they are making a much more active, they're becoming a much more active participant when they're coming from the Google side of things. So I guess that when I look at it, like just as far as quality of the traffic, yes, I would agree a hundred percent, even if it is a little more costly, you know, pennies on the dollar more or even a dollar more or something like that. The intent is just so much more powerful because I think the other side of it is then you can maybe rewind that and find those people specifically who are coming in through Google Ads. find those people specifically who are coming in through Google ads, and target those people even differently yet than someone generally who has come in through any other channel. But yeah, I mean, that's the roundabout way of saying that I would always pay more for Google

if we're coming from the search side. And I guess that's the rationale behind it there. No, I think that makes sense. And ultimately, what I'm trying to get you to do for the listeners to explain our philosophy on it, because they may not think about the way that people are using the platform. They just think, I see something in my credit card bill at the end of the month, Google ads.

I see something at the credit card bill at the end of the month, red ads. What in the world is the difference between these and how do I judge where to put my actual dollars? But I think you did a good job explaining it. So here's a story I always tell. So if you've listened before, you probably have heard me tell the story.

I'm sure I've told it to Paul as well, or we've been on a call together or something where I might have explained this in the past, but pretend you are not in the vacation industry. Pretend you are in the jewelry industry and you want to sell high end three to $5,000 diamond rings, which are certainly things that you can sell. Not something that you're going to, not a cold water on a hot day, right? Not as Dan Kennedy would say, a starving crowd of people looking to buy that. There's a very specific use case of someone going and buying a $3,000 diamond ring, usually for an engagement. So imagine a scenario where you are standing outside your shop and you just interrupt people all day. Hey, you seem to

have a nice young lady on your arm. Don't you want to propose? You should propose. Come in here. You guys should bring shop together and buy a ring. You will sell some rings that way over a long enough time period, interrupting enough people, talking to the right man who's actually, you know what? I was actually considering buying a ring. Let me go do that right now. You'll get some level of success from that. It's a lot better though if you're standing inside that shop and you could imagine this and a young man walks in and goes, I'm ready to broce my girlfriend. I'm ready to get engaged, get married, and I'm looking for a diamond ring. What do you have available? You're going to sell that guy 10 times better, probably 20 times better than you are the people you interrupt. And this is a Dan Kennedy thing too.

All media can work. So you can make ads deliver and get impressions and get clicks and get visibility for your brand on any media platform. It doesn't matter which one. The question is how well. That's the only question that you're answering or asking, and you should be able to answer as you do more paid advertising of any flavor. How well does this channel work? What am I paying versus what am I getting back out of it? And how is it serving whatever KPI or business goal I have in the backend? So that's my story of like how people can understand this, which is that, and of course the subtext here is that Google is someone going in that store and then looking specifically for that thing. Oh, I have diamond rings. Oh, I have vacation rentals in Destin, Florida. Is this what you're after? No, but I'm

interested in this. Okay. Then you book that. Or like you said, someone's on Facebook. Another thing people say all the time that really bothers me, by the way, is we had a website design go out to a client recently and they said, I want everything above the fold or I want a bunch of stuff above the fold. And they said, people don't scroll anymore. And I'm like, all social media is people scrolling endlessly. That is literally all they do. TikTok is a scroll.

But anyway, I had to bite my tongue on that one a little bit. I came up with a more nice answer to why I was like, yes, people scroll. That's the first thing they do when they get to the website, actually. You could genuinely make a case that putting something right under the fold might actually get a better click through rate in some respects than putting it above the fold, depending on what it is. But anyways, I digress. People going and engaging these platforms and then trying to get them, again, interruption advertising, getting them to come out to your platform, to your website, of course it could work. It's just a question of how well. We sell that to say the first thing

that we're going to talk about maybe then is Google search ads and how you target them. Because how you target them is actually a little bit different than every other form of targeting we'll talk about today. You Google, you target Google search ads mostly by what people are actually searching for. They can layer in some things in the backend. We can talk about that income targeting location, stuff like that. But for the most part, the keyword itself is sufficient enough targeting for you to serve an ad against that keyword. So if you're in Destin, Florida, or you're in Myrtle Beach, or you're in wherever you're in Branson and get people go and search vacation rentals in market. Like that's the thing you actually care about, right? You may find, again, you may find some data that indicating that people from this zip code or that zip code

are better and you can make good adjustments based on that. But the keyword is the targeting, right? And the same would apply in the owner and the owner set up too, right, Paul? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's something that I think we get so used to thinking about targeting just the people and you forget about it. You got to get in the minds of the people. It's not just I want everybody in the United States. I want this and that. You can.

If you want to, you can definitely target very specifically down to the zip code, down to the radius, down to anything like that. But it is. I think that's the when you've established the keywords that you want. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter if someone from Minnesota is doing that search versus someone from South Carolina versus someone from Maine. Unless you are doing near me with an abbreviation of Maine, I used to get some crazy searches there on on the traveler side with a near me campaign. I digress. Yeah, that is that's I think that's one of those things where you can winnow down the location and you can do more of a driving radius and stuff like that, which we saw that was a shift in COVID and doing stuff like that. But predominantly, it is. I think that's where maybe the misunderstanding of high cost of Google Ads comes from because people do. They say, oh, I want to target these states and I want to still target these specific keywords. And maybe I want to put some additional things. And they're not just doing bid adjustments, which is another option to, we'll say, educate

the algorithm on what type of audience you're looking for. But they're saying, I want to just go after these people specifically going with these keywords. You're restricting your audience pretty heavily there to a point where it's more difficult for Google to serve up those ads. Like it's easier for them to serve it up to 280 million people as opposed to 35 million people. So immediately you've increased probably your cost per click, let's say five, 10%, something like that. The more targeting you want, the more targeted the audience you want

to go after. Yes. Your cost per click will go up because you're reducing the audience that Google, Facebook, any of these channels can actually serve the ads up to. So there is, we got to think about this logically at the same time and casting that wide net of, yeah, I know exactly which keywords, what intent I want to get. I just need to make sure I'm targeting the right areas of people who are going to search here or that type of thing. But yeah, that's maybe more so on the owner side of things, because I do think there is a natural tendency on the traveler side, maybe a third of travelers are going to go to a drive to destination or going to go to the same

place they've gone to over and over again. You can't necessarily say every homeowner in Panama City Beach, Florida lives in Panama City Beach or lives in the Panhandle. They could be Washington to Florida, Maine to Hawaii. So that is, I guess that's where we have to think about, you know, personas and where is your, where's your guest persona? Where's your target persona of who you're going after on the guest side and the owner side and adjusting your strategy based on that? Because ultimately that, and that's what a lot of it boils down to. Yeah, on the search side of things, I always thought too that I like to make those adjustments once I actually have some data.

I've had clients in the past tell me this is where people are coming from and then I go and exclude certain areas and then it turns out later on, they mean 50% of people come from these areas. This other 50% that come from other areas, it would be perhaps foolish to exclude certain states in some scenarios. I remember one time this was early on when I just started out on my own when I left the agency that I was working for before. I had a client adamantly tell me

that 90% of his guests only came from three states. So I only targeted those three states in our advertising campaigns. And it was doing well, actually. Return on that's been strong, a lot of good metrics in the Google search side of things. Client happy, I'm happy, all good. But later on, he said, we actually have more budget, we're growing, we want to expand it. Let's see if we added in some other additional states. And we found that the state that he had ignored, and maybe just we wasn't getting those bookings from the listing sites, actually ended up converting pretty good. It wasn't as good, but it quickly became his third state over what he thought his third state actually was. The kind of mystery state here

that we added in there ended up being the third most popular. And then it actually did even better during COVID. So yeah, I'm with you there. I caution people against restricting the targeting too much at first. Now, if you have data, and I've seen this before where I have clients where we've got a thousand clicks from California, we've never got a conversion from there. Maybe it's just best at this point that we move on. We've got enough data now at this point that we've got a thousand clicks from Texas and we've gotten eight bookings. We got a thousand from Colorado and we got 14 bookings. Okay. We have enough data now to say maybe with some level of confidence that we should probably just go ahead and exclude California. People are searching, but they're not booking. It's not even

worth going into why sometimes it's like we've done enough traffic in, they're not converting. I think it's okay to move on from those. Yeah. Everything I do in the search side of things is like you said, it's usually small modifications, small bit adjustments to hopefully just try to get my ad ideally showing at the very top and looking the best when people who are, I believe, my most likely to convert are ready to search. And in that vein, I don't really care what it costs per click. I do, obviously, that factors into the return on ad spend. But generally speaking, if it costs $2 a click or $3 a click, but it's your ideal perfect guest and they're searching and they convert at 2% on the website, you can pay $5 a click and it's still be profitable. People just get this

idea in their mind sometimes that traffic should be cheap or paying $3 a click is bad. It's not bad at all if it's very targeted traffic. In fact, it might be the best traffic you spent or get to your website that month in many cases. And I think that's where we have. We've benefited from years of 30 cent, 40 cent clicks. And I think that's difficult to kind of stomach when you see your cost per click go up 3x 4x yeah and that's where i say cost per clicks of vanity metric like that's something where and we battle it an awful lot on the owner's side with people saying well now i get my clicks for two bucks a click on the owner's side and you guys got them for me for 12 or 13. I said, yeah, that's fine. What is the quality of those clicks you're getting? You may be getting six or seven more clicks per, but are there any higher quality? Are you converting at a higher

level? And ultimately that's not like it is. It's I'll pay whatever I need to pay to get the highest quality click. And if I have to really refine my targeting to get that, and that's what we have to do. And it's, I make the joke, I had a lot more hair on my head before I came over to the owner's side, but it is, it does make you want to tear your hair out every once in a while when you get 300 impressions and 30 clicks a month, and that's just what's there. So yeah, I think that certainly anything you can do to layer in, on the search side, it is keyword targeting. But anything you can do to layer in over top and try to leverage some of those third-party audiences

or affinity audiences or even making sure, I think the one thing that Google did a really poor job of, even up to the last year or so, is not allowing people to leverage more of their first party data. I have the Facebook to their credit and they don't get a lot, but you've pretty much always been able to take the pixel and put it on your website, get that retargeting going. After a while, and usually not that long even, you can upload a custom audience and start targeting to that. I had Google accounts where it took us a year or more before we were eligible and heavy air quotes there

to have custom audience lists going into the thing. Am I targeting those people specifically? No, but adding them in as an observation or doing something like that, being able to put a bid adjustment on it. It is so important to be able to really put your, I guess, put your hand on the weight or the foot on the pedal of where you actually want some of that additional targeting. Oh, because, yes, I've identified the keywords. Yes, I've identified the entire United States or this portion of the United States. How else do I put my own first party data in there? And as we look into 2024 too, I think the more that people are able to leverage

that first party data, it's going to be critical. Certainly we're moving towards that cookie list world and G4 isn't helping us, but there's some areas where we are getting some additional insights that we probably didn't on the universal analytics side of things. But the more you can get, the more you can tease out, whether that's a geolocation, whether that's a device ID, anything like that is stuff that you can leverage in your own campaigns moving forward. And I do, I think there's going to be more of a need for that, because the OTAs are going to continue to do their thing. They're going to try to push more traffic through search and through other means.

I think the book direct, while it's been the theme for quite a while now, will continue to be a, I think the demand there will still grow as far as you do need to have less reliance because as more people are impacted by the click of a mouse from an Airbnb or a Verbo, certainly it's something you have to keep in mind there. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say this. One thing that I believe to be true is that it's incumbent upon the property manager to make sure the guest books direct and people nod their heads and they say, oh yeah. But then I'm like, you have to set up an infrastructure that's similar to that of what they're used to. And then they're, sometimes they don't like hearing that, right?

They want this idea that, oh, why it would be, you'd be a fool to go and book on Airbnb when you can get the same thing on my website for cheaper, but your website doesn't talk about the same things. Your cancellation policies are worse than if I booked through Airbnb. I can't find your website or when I find it, it doesn't scream trustworthy.

The design is bad and stuff. All the clients we have that get great results from their direct booking efforts have a nice website. Like it looks and it has a professional appearance. It's fast and it works quickly and so on and so forth. And that goes in advertising too. Because when you're advertising, you are advertising against all the other OTAs

in the same bracket, right? So when someone sees your result on Google search or whether they see a Facebook ad or Google display ad or whatever, they might see the same ad from an OTA. And your advantage isn't maybe as strong as you might think with the guest knows that brand. Maybe they know the Airbnb brand.

So if they are shopping to go to a new place they haven't been before, and they see you and then they see Airbnb right by side by side, they may think, certainly Airbnb will have more listings than my website. Whatever, even if you're the biggest property manager in the market, probably Airbnb has more listings, barring very few. So it's often a better experience for that guest to go onto a listing site and find what they're looking for. Then of course, there's off platform where they might find you on a platform and then later book you off platform. That's maybe a different thing we can talk about a different day. But yeah, I think a lot of people feel like they're entitled to the

booking. I've had that commentary come through in the past, or I've talked to someone and I'm like, you're not entitled to it. You know what I mean? Like you only get to earn it. You have to earn that booking directly through your marketing, advertising, and branding and promotion efforts. And if you're sending people to a site that's ready to convert. So anyways, we can turn the page into Facebook, Instagram ads. We're all good. I think we've beat up Google search and maybe we'll circle back and do Google display.

Because actually this might be the order in which I recommend doing them in terms of like best conversion to worst conversion or like brand building, which is like Google search ads first, then Facebook, Instagram depends a little bit on your target demographic. And then maybe coming back to Google display as like the final idea. So yeah, how can I target Facebook and Instagram ads? You've touched on it already. You've talked about the pixel, you've talked a little bit about first party data versus third party data. So maybe you could lay out just at a high level, how do you typically target a Facebook as an owner side? And then what's your views on the guest side as well when you were doing? Yeah, typically it is. And we want anybody who's hitting the landing page specifically, the owner landing page specifically.

Now I have people who, yeah, retargeting is definitely going to be, I think the primary way more so on the owner side, because there is a specific page. Hopefully you have a dedicated landing page. If you don't have a dedicated landing page, come talk to us. We'll get you figured out here or just put something out there. But I think in knowing people who have hit that page versus any other page on your website, that's critical because it isn't usually easy. It is. It should be easier. I think there's a barrier to entry to get to that page. Sometimes that maybe is a little too high, it should be easier. I think there's a barrier to entry to get to that page. Sometimes that maybe is a little too high, but at the same time, that also makes your retargeting arguably a little cleaner because you have people who are hitting that page, hopefully from a Google search ad with

that high intent and really being able to identify people who are actively trying to get to that page. Yeah. Are you going to get some traffic? That's not great. They're almost always. And that's, that's part of retargeting. So certainly that's something that we do. The nice thing about within the Venturi stack, people are getting the CRM. They're getting some marketing assistance, we'll say, marketing services, managed services, stuff like that. But one of the biggest components I've always thought of our offering is the data.

It does. It allows you to upload a custom list of potentially absentee owners or maybe owners already in your program or owners. You can really take custom lists in a lot of different directions, which I think is helpful there. One area, I will say the extra credit point I always try to give people from the Facebook side of things, especially on the owner side, there are a ton of owner groups or realtor groups or things like that in specific areas. The one targeting thing that you can do in Facebook that's a little different, you can try to scrape that entire list of users in a group. It's tough. And you're probably going

to pay a freelancer or something a lot of money to try to get something that the data might not be so good. However, one of those other things that you can do, you can actually target in Facebook by video views. So you post your kind of holiday video or your holiday card or your just prop company overview. And you retarget the people who have been in that group. That way you're able to get in that group without actually being able to advertise explicitly to that group. That way you're able to get in that group without actually being able to advertise explicitly to that group. So those are some of the ways as far as trying to leverage that first party data, certainly being able to upload a custom audience list is key. Making sure you can retarget with that pixel, very important there. And then the granularity to

which you want to do some of the other targeting with lists on the guest side of things, rebooking type of thing, booking anniversary type of campaigns, depending on how granular you want to get and still acknowledging that you need a certain audience size to serve up the ads. You can't just put in maybe 50 people and hope that it's going to serve or 25 people. I think that's something that in any audience targeting that you're doing here, whether it's in it through any digital channel, you have to make sure there's enough to serve up the ads because ultimately Google's good. Facebook's good. Display networks are great. But if they don't have the number of people to serve the ad up to, maybe you'll get a $50 cost because it's like reducing that audience size on the Google side. All you're doing is potentially reducing the pool that these networks can serve the ads up to. So

your cost per click will increase. You got to play that premium. Yeah, I think you outlined it well there. I think a lot of overlaps on the guest side of things. People have been on the website, but haven't yet converted are obviously a pretty hot audience. So using the pixel, doing a website retargeting is our classic middle funnel campaign. People have engaged with you. I didn't hear these two pieces. People have engaged with you on Facebook before. Could be a custom audience as well.

So if they like your page on Facebook or they are a follower on Instagram, those can also be audiences that we typically put into our middle funnel because I figure, hey, they follow you. They've been on your page.

They must have a little awareness as to what you're doing, what's going on. Helps a little bit if you're more active on the organic side of posting content. If you never post content or post very rarely or you don't have much of a following, then those audiences don't really move the needle as much. We have clients that have sometimes audiences that we just started a new client down in Florida,

who's got 80,000 fans on our Facebook page. So I'm like, that's a pretty huge step to tap into on the guest marketing side of things right away, which I think is helpful. And then email list, you just touch on that, but same logic that I would apply to that middle funnel. People that have been on the website, people that follow the page or know about you already, and the people on the email list. Then the top funnel, like you were describing almost a few minutes ago, the world's your oyster in some respect, right? You could upload a data file. Maybe you get that from inventory so you can target the homeowners. That makes a lot of sense. You can then expand that targeting with lookalike. Lookalike audiences are very common. So if you're trying to find new people, a lookalike sometimes can be a good way of doing that, whether it's on the owner side or on the

guest side. So take the source list of here's people that are already on my customers, or you could upload your current list of owners, which you don't really want to show out to them because they're already an owner. But you may try to ask Facebook, hey, find me people that are similar to these 200 people or 500 people maybe that you have as owners, because it may do a better job than you think of finding more similar audiences to the one that you already are doing business with that you would ideally in a perfect world find more of same logic applies to guests here's guests that have stayed with us before actually a larger client of ours i told recently let's take a list of only people that have booked twice and then use that as our source for the lookalike just to see if maybe these super guests or people that have

stayed three times four times he had someone on that list that stayed with them 13 times since he opened in 2007 i was like this guy loves you clearly we just need to find more of this guy when we're in business he's yeah it's a family friend and this and that i said sure but his behavior pattern indicates that staying once is a family friend staying 13 times means he likes you likes what you're doing right so we put him into or like that whole set of people that have stayed more than once into an audience set and it seems to be doing well from like click-through rate perspective so facebook's doing a good job there so these are ideas where you could just build your own audience. Now I will say they remove some of our audience targeting options. I don't know how you did it on the homeowner side. We

used to have nice income stuff that I used to be able to use. I used to be able to target pages once they were a certain size. I feel like that's gone away a little bit. So you sometimes have to get creative. Like one thing that I've seen people stack this up before, actually one of the presenters at Darm talked about this. I think it was Lauren at Femreserves. She said to find homeowners, she encouraged you to do a real estate investing interest plus a Airbnb interest. So it's like in theory, they're interested in real estate investing

and they like the Airbnb page on Facebook. There might be more of a match there potentially for owner targeting. Like I was saying there, it's really all the ingredients are on the table inside of Facebook. You have to decide how you bring them together. Maybe you have some other ideas

on top funnel targeting for Facebook and Instagram ads. You know, I think that it is a getting people just the top of funnel i i think it is it facebook is a great channel for that because especially on the guest side there is more just dreaming you're in that dreaming phase of oh maybe i can inspire the inspiration phase there just maybe i can oh i love that picture oh now i think facebook leads you down and it doesn't even have to be facebook ads i think that's when you're talking about the organic posting making sure you are getting driving more of that inspirational stuff so that you can follow that up with some type of special offer for the top of funnel type of maybe top middle funnel with that intent of thinking on the traveler side. I think that's

where Facebook is a, and any display channel is going to be a really good opportunity to get that inspiration of, okay, I want to travel. I want, I like getting people in that mindset of, I want to travel because that's not always the case. I think that's maybe something we've had to work a little more on. These economic factors could be playing in there certainly and all those other things. But that's, I think you can make the argument that if you're going to drive people further through the funnel, you're going, it is, you're going to have to hit multiple channels there at some point along the lines. It is, I think you're going to create some of that top of funnel interest just by making people think about travel. Then they're going to go to the Google. They're going to go to Google. They're

going to go to Bing. They're going to do those searches. And I think what ultimately we're talking about here is setting yourself up for success by putting that full funnel into place. Regardless of how you're targeting it, you're going to have to put different channels in different phases of the funnel to make sure that you're getting people that booking to that conversion line and going that way. Yeah. No, I think that makes complete sense. And some people just don't realize

what's back there. I feel like when a client builds their own Facebook, Instagram ads, it's like they put in two targeting things. They're like, yeah, like Airbnb in Florida. I'm like, ah, we might need to get a little more specific with who we're actually targeting and reaching out to. But to be fair, it's hard for them. And I think the other side of what we're talking about is the targeting. I think one of the other huge parts of targeting, both in Google and Facebook, and I was trying to work it in there just a minute ago, but it's the exclusion. Like you want to know who you're targeting, but you also want to take some people out in some cases. That's for search side, that's as simple. And again, air quotes are going to be heavy here on the simple. That's as simple as putting negative keywords in or excluding specific audience or bidding down specific audiences. Now,

thanks to housing employment and credit policies for Google and Facebook, sometimes it's a little more difficult to do some of that. But hey, if you don't want people from the bottom half for socioeconomic, exclude it. If you don't want people for homeowners from the third party affinity audience or something like that, exclude it. Make sure you're actually hitting the people you want to by removing some of the clutter. There's a difference between reducing your targeting

and excluding people or audiences that you just don't want to have in there. And it is maybe for your homeowner side marketing, you don't want your homeowners to see the ads. You'd for your homeowner side marketing, you don't want your homeowners to see the ads. You'd rather see, have other people do it. So exclude those ads specifically or exclude those people specifically. If you don't want people seeing the ads, take them out because ultimately you're going to waste money on showing your ads or getting clicks from people that ultimately you may not want. Now you got to be be careful with exclusion, certainly. And you don't

want to take out the wrong people or the right people or whatever it is. But I think that's something where including everything is important, but finding what you want to exclude and getting that out. Use exclusion, use negative keywords, use those things, bid down. You can bid, bid adjustments can go up, but bid adjustments can go down too. So let's say I want to take, I want to still get clicks, but I'd like those at a reduced rate. So I'm going to bid down 30%. I'll still take an 18 to 24 year old click, but I'm going to pay 30% on average less than I would for anybody else in any of those other age groups. So just something else to keep in mind there as you're looking at finding that right audience.

Yeah, and it may require testing. And the tricky part, to be honest, is that it requires data to make that kind of call. You really have to have enough conversions coming in. Where ideally you see, okay, it's not impossible that an 18 to 24 year old person would convert on my homeowner campaign or even guest campaign. Let's say that it's the child searching for the mother or the father. Hey, honey, we're thinking of working with a new property manager next year. Could you look and see if you see any companies that look trustworthy to you? I'm busy. I have business going on over here. So I think you have to be careful around being highly rigid about, no, no one under 24 years old would ever have a second home. Usually that probably is true,

but not necessarily always the case. Or sometimes the child's searching for the adult. So I'm actually not as big on excluding, like you were saying, excluding your current homeowners or excluding past guests, recent past guests on Facebook ads too, because I actually like when a current homeowner sees the ad in some respect or a guest, because they know we're still advertising, unless it's an offer you don't want them to see. If it's like a free deep plane and you're not offering free deep plane to your current homeowners, that can put you in a little bit of an awkward position. So that may make a lot of sense to do exclusions. But this happens to me all the time. We run ads for clients and then

they actually get comments on the ad from guests. So, oh, I just booked and I'm staying next week. I actually think that's a huge credibility builder on the actual ad itself. For some, for Paul based in Minnesota says, oh, actually right after Christmas, my family and I are going here. We're looking forward to it. I like that on the ad. I actually think that it makes the ad perform better typically in my experience.

Or a homeowner, this has happened to clients of ours before. We do like feature property ads. We sometimes include the current homeowners into that set intentionally. And then we have homeowners every once in a while commenting and saying, go book, don't go book Bluebird Cottage, go book this other property. And I'm like, ah, that's not ideal. But you know what? I like it because they're at least seeing, oh, they have other properties. Because imagine that person seeing that ad in the feed, they're not on their website, they don't see everything. So part of me is like a little perturbed by it. But then part of me leaves the comment up because

they're like, who knows, maybe someone click on that and book it and Klein's still happy. Obviously, we want more clicks to go to the feature property because it usually needs the help. But that's in a scenario where I'm a little bit less bullish than some people are on like the moment they book, taking them out of everything from an ad targeting perspective. I don't think it's always a bad thing to remind them about the brand, remind them about what they're about experience. And as long as you're not wasting tons of money on this, I think it could provide some

potential benefit as well. We're coming against it a little bit time-wise. Maybe we round out with Google Display because I always think that display advertising in general, and I've joked about this before with you, is I call it mystery meat. You just don't know what you're going to get. And I think as much as we just sung praises about Google Search and the quality of that traffic and how it converts best and we have clients spending $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 a month on Google Search ads on display, I just never seem to find the same success. So I think it plays a role.

It can potentially help, certainly on the retargeting side. A lot of the same things we talked about before can be done inside of Google display, right? You can target ads people up on the website. You can target your email list with an ad. You can show up now with Performance Max in a lot of different places, in Gmail, in YouTube, and all these places that get all this traffic. But I just don't know if I personally crack the code and getting it to convert well. So what's your frame on how the listener should be thinking about it?

What's their actual objective? Because maybe sales isn't the actual objective. And how much budget should they dedicate to this potentially if you were setting this up from scratch on the homeowner side? And I'll talk about the guest side. Yeah, I think one of your biggest metrics for Google display, and I could make the argument for Facebook display as well, really any display that you're doing is what is your brand awareness, brand exposure?

And I think a really good metric to measure that by is going into Google search console, taking a look at what kind of branded searches you have over X period and seeing as you actually have the display running, what kind of growth you see there? Because I would agree as far as engagement that's coming from Google Display or anything like that, it's tough. You do, I think the benefit of having those opportunities, especially with PMAX, Performance Max campaigns, is you can be in a lot of different Google channels.

Clearly, Google is inherent in a lot of people's lives there. I think that's something that to show up in Gmail, to show up on YouTube, to show up in any of the Google display networks that are out there, I think that's beneficial. But it is, as far as cracking the code, yeah, much higher thresholds if you're using a custom audience to actually get those ads to display. You have to have a thousand, not just a thousand people in a list or a thousand people in retargeting lists, but a thousand active users. And I think that's where it comes down to, hey, there may be people from an owner list or something like that, where they're not active. They may have an email address, but they're just not active. And you

may have a list of 4,000, 5,000, but if only 20% of that is active, it's going to be a struggle to get people who are actually going to see those ads. So I think that plays a role there. I think the other side is that because the Google display network is so vast, you're going to end up in some places where you just may not want to end up. So having a very good pulse on the little section in Google Display Ads where your ad showed, critical to be able to make sure, hey, I'm on this YouTube channel. Do I want to be on this YouTube channel?

I'm on this website. Do I want to be on this website? Is this really matching the right? We get on a lot of, on the owner side, we get on a lot of real estate websites and realtor websites and Section 8 housing websites that just aren't that beneficial to us in the grand scheme of things. So I do, I think that the mystery meat, if you can untangle a little gold from that mystery meat, sure.

But I would always tend to tread lightly, especially on the owner side. I guess side, I think you've got a little more leeway. You're working with bigger numbers, bigger audiences, stuff like that. But it's not top on my recommendation list. It's not the middle of my recommendation list. That's usually not on my recommendation list. So we'll leave it right there. I was muted.

Sorry. I've said a great joke there, which is that maybe you're looking for the steak amongst the mystery meat. There's steak in there. You just got to hunt to find it for sure. And you got to be really diligent on negatives and stuff like that. That's for sure. So yeah, I will say this. I gave this away at the end of the Darm session and it was, you can actually build an audience on Google display. This is one of the few platforms you can, where you can take all your competitors'

websites, put them in there and say, find me people who visit my competitors' websites. And that's pretty cool. Like you can't deny that. That's a pretty clever way to do some ad targeting and build an audience in that way. So ultimately you've got to figure out what's the creative, what's the offer that works for you. And you might just need to be willing to test a little bit more on display. Like with search, we find our footing pretty quickly. With Facebook, Instagram, we typically find traffic coming in, we can look at the comments, we can look at the time on website, and we go, all right, it doesn't take us too long to find the right mix there on Facebook and Instagram. With display, I would say we've had more failures than successes, that's for sure.

But when you find the right audience that you're targeting and people are coming back and booking, or at least clicking the website, spending a lot of time, that's usually a healthy sign that you're on the right track. So yeah, it's a it's a comment on you or your agency or whatever advertising person you're working with to find that right audience, but there's definitely traffic to be had there. But it could potentially work well for you if you set it up correctly. So that's 40 minutes on ad targeting. I'm sure the listener appreciated it. And they now feel very targeted and very savvy about how to target ads in the future. So all good, Paul, anything else here before we put a lovely wrapped Christmas bow on this one for today? No, I think this is ready to go under the tree and a stocking, something like that. I think

we're just about ready to go. All right. Awesome. Merry Christmas. If the listener is listening to this, I'm sure after Wednesday of this week, it'll probably be Christmas at their time, maybe, or about to be Christmas. So Merry Christmas if you're listening. And if you celebrate, happy Hanukkah, whatever flavor of holiday you support. We probably support it along with you. So all good in that department. We appreciate it. You give us a gift. And you know what, Paul, what's awesome about this gift that we're asking for? Completely free. Not going to cost you a dime. No shipping, no Amazon, no taxes, no nothing. You go to your podcast app of choice, and you click five stars. And that would be the only Christmas gift that we would ask the listener to potentially consider employing

or consider giving us that would make our whole year. I think we're a few short of our goals. That's it. I'll do the beg for reviews, but honestly, happy holidays to all the folks out there listening. We do appreciate it. If you made it this far, you must've liked what we had to say. So thank you again. And we'll catch you on the next episode of the heads and bed show.